If you lived in Tornado Alley, with a good chance someday an F5 would barrel down on you like a freight train, you’d have to think, OK, what am I gonna do, if the sirens start to blare? What if the power went out, if there was no food in the stores, no money? What about my job, my house, how might I keep the people I love from harm?
Or if you discovered an asteroid was headed for earth, you’d think, what am I gonna do? Ride my motorcycle to high ground, or get Bruce Willis and Steve Buscemi to DO something, dammit? And if the asteroid harbored invading aliens? Why, you’d start searching for the bacteria that will kill them, or rummaging through the LP bin for Slim Whitman records.
But it is not an asteroid or tornado headed for you, or a hurricane, haboob, tsunami, or taifun. It is, rather, a giant asshole.
--I think the children should leave the room. Desperate times call for us adults to abandon the usual niceties about brisk language and frank depiction. (Kids: You don’t want to end up like this. And these are desperate times. Major-party presidential candidate Donald Trump is the quintessential asshole of our time, an expansive, multidimensional momzer who puts every other contender in the shade.
And he is headed straight at you.
So here’s my question. What are you going to do, the day after He wins? Or in the weeks and months afterward? You’d never not plan for the tornado or the earthquake that has a statistical chance.
This eventuality needs a plan, too. Because nobody’s selling insurance policies against an unhinged narcissist becoming president. It’s up to you. Whatcha gonna do when he comes for you, bad boy?
I know, I know. There’s no way he wins. There just cannot be enough idiots in the country for it ever to happen.
But. Strange days have found us. Confusion is making his masterpiece. How easily did Trump shred to tatters the smugness, then the resolve, and finally the will of the GOP! Martin Amis asks, “The question is, Can he do it with American democracy?” harpers.org/...
You think he can’t? Michael Moore thinks he can, and he will. He thinks Trump is enough people’s “personal Molotov cocktail to throw right into the center of the bastards who did this to you,” for him to win. He notes that Trump voters are going to be more motivated to vote. And, just as in the election of Jesse Ventura, a large number of voters just feel like fucking with a system that has been fucking with them for it seems their whole lives.
Glenn Greenwald agrees, too, that the impetus that will put Trump in the White House will be the same one that put an indigestible Brexit on the menu and then forced the British people to spread pub mustard on it and eat it. Namely, that “people have been so fucked by the prevailing order in such deep and fundamental and enduring ways that they can’t imagine that anything is worse than preservation of the status quo. “
Charlie Pierce puts the Trump voter’s prevailing feeling this way: “If you accept that the world's gone mad, then a madman might well be the most reliable guide through it.”
Let’s say it does happen, then. In the same statistically haywire way a nuclear power plant near you melts through its containment walls. In that case, you will have needed to think clearly beforehand about what steps you should take. Sensible as it might seem, running in circles screaming often oddly does no good.
(An aside: You know who will be especially bad at preparedness? Members of the media, who have used the time they might have been doing actual reporting to show without interruption or challenge every lying, insulting speech (with replay for those who missed it the first time); who have time after time failed the remedial course on Follow-up Questions; who have substituted for accurate description of this plague of frogs a repeated gee-ain’t-we-dumb echo of the word “unprecedented,” as though it is airtight justification for their huge salaries that they see only what fits the way they already think things are. These clowns the Great Orange Shelob will drag unconscious back to the cave while they are still trying to figure out what that terrible smell is.)
(Another aside: just being angry does not qualify you as a Trump voter. You couldn’t get more angry than I am, but I’m angry mostly at him.)
Think what it might mean in practical terms to have in charge of the general welfare, common defense, and domestic tranquility a thorough wanker whose whole life has been directed toward making a list of asshole things to do, and then making sure he got them done. Whose stated reason for wanting to be the figurehead of the longest tenured democracy is to prove what a right bastard he can be, and whose qualifications are how good he is at redirecting as much money as possible from someone else’s pocket to his.
What would you guess, for instance, is his conception of the Postal Service’s primary function? Bingo! To make a profit! Not to reliably, and for a single price, deliver mail to any address in the whole nation. What kind of loser would want to be involved in that? (Sorry Ben Franklin. You were so pitiful. So pitiful.)
Can you imagine that ruining the Postal Service, health care, the environment, or making sure some poor soul gets it good and hard could be on his list of asshole things for a right bastard president to do? Think of that list! The possibilities!
He could change the national motto from E pluribus unum to what Will Rogers said the Republican party’s was: Boys, my back is turned.
Would a President Trump work very hard to ensure, say, the FDIC lived up to its fiduciary responsibilities? Could he contemplate turning schools, prisons, the CDC, you name it, over to his buddies for a good old-fashioned looting?
I think so, too. Then one thing you should definitely do is protect your finances. Whatever you think that means. You know as much as I do.
If you invest, might I suggest prudently run companies that make actual things? (My brother says, “Change in your money for gold,” but this is the brother who has successfully predicted twelve of the last two financial catastrophes. Still, wouldn’t hurt to have a few extra dollars in the top dresser drawer Wednesday morning, Nov. 9. Cash came in mighty handy in Greece when they put limits on the ATMs during its banking crisis.)
Then there’s the matter of your safety. This is a longer-term problem.
There’s domestic security, purging “liberals” from the civil service, replacing them with cronies who don’t believe someone like you (insert group here) should even qualify for assistance, or get their trash picked up or get a license to do business.
Power, water, sewer, or trash services disrupted by unions refusing to accept arbitrary pay cuts? Newly brokered “deals” that fell through or were so crappy no one would agree to them? Or Trump deciding to “walk away” from standing guarantees of things crucially important to you or yours.
The man is opposed to fair play/ He wants it all and he wants it his way. This is what you ought to prepare yourself and your family for.
And that’s before we even get to appointing businesspeople to “serve in government,” as Chris Christie put it, “part time without having to give up their jobs in the private sector.” No revolving door anymore, with former execs regulating their own industries—current execs will be doing it! What could possibly go wrong? You got a mortgage, anything like that?
Then there’s international security. Widening circles of mayhem, like ripples on a pond. Collapse of international agreements, wholesale and arbitrary abrogation of treaties, protections once taken for granted abandoned, with unpredictable but predictably shitty effects. Maybe not right away, but over time, Trump’s idiot dickhead’s understanding of government might unravel things a little, you think? Increase vulnerability for others, who would direct it back at us, ratcheting upwards. Putin, NATO, Muslims the world round. Frightening friends and tempting enemies.
[Public service break]
OK, look Trump people. I am not saying Trump would refuse even to try to protect the country’s interests. But the man is a megalomaniac shyster who will mostly define “national interest” as “Trump’s interest.” Then too, try as he might, everything that he has said or done for, oh, such a long time, does not provide a single piece of evidence that he would do anything but be a stupendous fuckup. The only thing he has proven himself competent in is when shit meets fan being somewhere else with a list of people to stick the bill with.
But you’d never be one of those people, right? I mean, you voted for him! He’d be grateful!
[Returning to regularly scheduled programming]
So what, exactly, should you do? Buy a generator? A concrete shelter? Stock up on survival supplies? Flee to Canada, New Zealand (right behind you, RBG!), or Costa Rica? Form self-sufficient communes? Secede, as a city, region, or state? Arm yourself? Riot? Plot civil disobedience, or an insurrection? Go into the streets cursing and throwing rocks?
You could do those things, sure. And the wheel would take another turn.
There’s another course. A way that would most lastingly defend you in the event of a Trump presidency and also most prevent its happening.
Throwing rocks and insults is what Trump does. It’s what feeds and strengthens anger, resentment, and hate. When he was finally to fall (as they all do), he would certainly have been consumed by that which nourished him. But he’d take a lot of us with him along the way, and a lot of progress, too.
Furious anger and vengefulness is not what the world has too little of.
You may not change a single Trumpster’s mind, or vote, by being civil where they are bad-mannered and vulgar. Not yelling at them that they are primitive, racist, and stupid. (Even when it is true; they know they are acting that way, and they revel in it.) Remember the anger the pundits can’t seem to get to the bottom of? It is a metastasizing tumor, for some now beyond their control, but it is good for us to remember it stems partly from people having “been fucked over in ways that are really bad and need to be rectified.”
Like Daesh, this ugliness cannot be defeated by pitting its own violent means against it. Only the calm voice, confident in the power of reason and the strength of the feeling heart can conquer it, slow though it may be. Only the sure knowledge that love does finally in fact trump hate, which takes three steps back for every apparent step forward. We do not overcome hate with more hate, vulgarity with more loutishness, but by being persons who, “before we say exactly what is on our minds, we run it past ourselves, to see if it makes sense, is true, is fair, has a flavor of kindness, and won’t hurt someone or make someone’s difficult life more difficult.”
This calls for a revolution. Sustained by citizens—you—acting as you wish they would. Citizens, not just taxpayers. The kind of citizen you wish every citizen would be.